by Steve Smith
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I: Purgation
Chapter One: A Quaker in the Zendo
Chapter Two: Standing Still in the Light
Chapter Three: Pure Passion
Part II: Illumination
Chapter Four: Living Peace
Chapter Five: Healing Gender Hurt
Chapter Six: Friendly Pedagogy
Part III: Union
Chapter Seven: In the Love of Nature
Chapter Eight: Joyful Witness
Chapter Nine: Walking Cheerfully Over the World
Bibliography
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CHAPTER TWO STANDING STILL IN THE LIGHT
Returning with new eyes to my own Quaker hearth, I read in Fox’s Journal and epistles, the writings of Isaac Penington and early Quaker women, and recent scholars on Quaker history. I am startled by treasures of insight that give practical guidance in finding one’s way to the Light. Buried within the ashes of my life, long hidden while I elsewhere earnestly sought solace and now revealing itself to my wondering mind, I awaken to the gift of my own heart—floating in the mind of God.
Be Still and Cool
In 1658, Lady Elizabeth Claypole—beloved daughter of Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector of England—is very sick and troubled in mind, and nothing could comfort her. Cromwell is under threat of assassination, sharpening Elizabeth’s mental distress. Elizabeth will die in August, to be joined in death one month later by her father. The leader of the rapidly-growing Quaker movement has gained a reputation as a keen discerner of spirits and a worker of miraculous healings. Hearing of Elizabeth’s sickly condition, Fox is moved of the Lord to write a paper and send it to her to be read unto her. His letter to Claypole provides intimate insight into the causes of spiritual distress and how they may be eased:
Be still and cool in thy own mind and spirit from thy own thoughts, and then thou wilt feel the principle of God to turn thy mind to the Lord God, whereby thou wilt receive his strength and power from whence life comes, to allay all tempests, against blusterings and storms. That it is which moulds up into patience, into innocency, into soberness, into stillness, into stayedness, into quietness, up to God, with his power… which keeps peace, and brings up the witness in thee… When thou art in the transgression of the life of God in the particular, the mind flies up in the air, and the creature is led into the night, and nature goes out of his course… and so it comes to be all of a fire… .
Therefore be still a while from thy own thoughts, searching, seeking, desires and imaginations, and be stayed in the principle of God in thee…; and thou wilt find strength from him and find him to be a present help in time of trouble, in need, and to be a God at hand. …There thou wilt come to receive and feel the physician of value, which clothes people in their right mind, whereby they may serve God and do his will… . What the light doth make manifest and discover, temptations, confusions, distractions, distempers; do not look at the temptations, confusions, corruptions, but at the light that discovers them, that makes them manifest; and with the same light you will feel over them, [you will] receive power to stand against them. … For looking down at sin, and corruption, and distraction, you are swallowed up in it; but looking at the light that discovers them, you will see over them. That will give victory; and you will find grace and strength; and there is the first step of peace.¹
Fox’s words are a primer for the practice of silent Quaker worship. Though they did not save Lady Claypole from an early death, they are a balm to my troubled heart. In rough-hewn 17th-Century prose, Fox offers an apt diagnosis not only of Lady Claypole’s condition, but of mine as well. Effective healing begins with careful diagnosis—and when the malady has spiritual roots, an accurate diagnosis requires larger insight than can be discerned by the small mind. To see clearly, I must awaken to a searching light that lays bare all confusion and error. This same light enfolds me in a healing embrace—and I gain strength to move forward.
Fox ascribes this vaster vision without hesitation to the Lord God—yet for him (and for us today) religious names and theological descriptions are less important than the dynamics of the inner process, recognized in many religions and variously clothed in their distinctive language, symbols, and rituals. Fox invokes the witness or observing self—a central feature in awakening to presence.²
Isaac Penington, a 17th-Century Quaker mystic, offers another paradigmatic account:
Be no more than God hath made thee. Give over thine own willing; give over thine own running; give over thine own desire to know or to be any thing, and sink down to the seed which God sows in thy heart, and let that grow in thee, and be in thee, and breathe in thee, and act in thee, and thou shalt find by sweet experience that the Lord knows that, and loves and owns that, and will lead it to the inheritance of life, which is his portion.³
Diagnosis
According to long-standing Christian doctrine, the greatest human sin is pride. To paraphrase Penington, it is trying to be more than God has made—living in self-deception and hypocrisy. Such pretense often stems from a hidden fear than I am not enough; that I lack some fundamental feature of full humanity. If this were true, then the present moment with all of its uncertainty and messy imperfection would be intolerable—for to plumb it would be to face my failure as a human being. To avoid facing this intolerable thought, I hold my uneasiness at bay with an infinite variety of compensatory behaviors.
Yet to run from the present moment is to flee the only place where true healing and comfort may be found. Fox describes this fleeing journey in graphic terms: When thou art in the transgression of the life of God in the particular, the mind flies up in the air, and the creature (i.e. one’s physical being) is led into the night, and nature goes out of his course… . [And] so it comes to be all of a fire… . God is here, now, in the particular—the details of my life. When I pursue temptations or obsess about my fears, my mind flies up in the air and I am led into the night. To find the life of God in the particular, I must surrender fully to this moment and bear my own pain, without fleeing or flailing.
Seeing the darkness into which I have wandered—alcoholism and drug abuse, alienation from myself—brings humiliation and shame. Even those who love me cannot walk with me into my anguish, nor remove its
sting. Still, my willingness to take that walk owes something to the lessons of my Quaker childhood. Once when I am small, in an unguarded moment my mother tells me that for all of his flaws, my father is honest with himself. I am deeply impressed, admiring his courage. A good Quaker man, my father had in some measure lived into a central feature of Friends’ spiritual practice—severe submission to the truth of one’s life.
Fox came to his own great 1647 opening through just such devastating surrender: he writes, when all my hopes… in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, then, Oh then, I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition’, and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy.⁴
An Annihilating Path
Perhaps every major religious tradition calls for death of the small self so that we may open upon ultimate Reality. Early Friends’ understanding of this death was trenchant. A leading Quaker scholar, Douglas Gwyn, describes the spirituality of early Friends as a harrowing, annihilating path,⁵ a spirituality of desolation.⁶ He writes that Quaker preachers offered not sublime mystical transport but a traumatic passage through death to a realm where God’s will is known first-hand and power to obey is received.⁷ This is the narrow gate, the way to the kingdom. The desolation of the self must take place on the inner landscape before one comes to know the Christ returned.⁸
The harrowing, annihilating path that was followed by Fox and other early Friends requires extraordinary commitment and faith, a willingness to risk all of myself. Can I surrender so completely? Such a commitment is required if I am to emerge through the door of Quakerism into a rich spiritual life.
Discipline
Like others, I want my religion to be easy, comfortable, undemanding; I have too much to do already, too many claims upon my time and energy. I want a soothing sideline to occupy some of my leisure time when I am so inclined. From time to time, I busy myself with Quaker activities, but shrink from changing my life. This tepid attitude is remote from the terrifying yet exhilarating call of authentic Christianity and Quakerism, indeed from devout religious practice in any tradition. Even after devastating crisis had led me to explore Asian traditions, my everyday life was scarcely changed. I read, I ruminated, I enthused, I wrote—yet went on with my life much as before. A providential coincidence nudged me from appreciative spectator to active participant—the presence of a Zen center just five minutes’ walk from my new home.
Since that change, I have become keenly aware of a watershed in spiritual practice: for years I viewed spiritual paths sympathetically, read with interest and applauded from the sidelines—yet remained a spectator, unchanged by my intellectual explorations. Even now I resist the plunge into actual practice, surrender, and transformation.
Friends frequently use the word practice (as in faith and practice), but I had thought of Quaker practice as simply how Quakers behave when they live by Quaker values. Missing from my simplistic understanding was recognition of the strenuous effort, commitment, and risk required to live truly in the Light. Missing also was the notion of practice as practicing: trying and failing, trying again and again—repeated efforts over a lifetime to bring order into the chaos of my life. Christian writers speak of this sustained effort as the imitation of Christ. Although monastic traditions hold up the ideal of a wholly God-inspired life, lay religious practice (and, if truth be told, most monastic practice as well) typically drifts far from such an ideal.
Early Friends expressly rejected world-renouncing monasticism; but they did not endorse in its place an easy, undemanding spirituality; rather, they cautioned against succumbing to the seductive charms of a worldly life. They knew the devastation and fierce joy of seeking to do God’s will in one’s life and in the world, as one empties of self and grows into what one most truly is.
Books of Quaker Faith and Practice are traditionally called Book of Discipline, another word I had passed over too readily. In an age of instant gratification and comfort, discipline often rings of punishment for wrongdoing, with no resonance of the straitening pleasures of self-transcendence through submission to an exacting regimen. Significant accomplishment in most walks of life requires a paradoxical combination of strenuous application and surrender of self-will. I found it easy to recognize a demanding path to excellence in challenging educational endeavors, high-level athletic performance, skilled artistic expression, and elsewhere, even when I chose not to walk on it. But in spiritual matters I favored an easier, more comfortable route, sitting down each week in meeting for worship and hoping that without any risk or commitment, lightning would strike.
With its physically challenging postures, its long periods of carefully composed immobility and its cultural tradition of austerity, Zen gives the lie to such spiritual laziness. But I would not have needed to engage in Buddhist meditation to realize this fact, had I faced squarely the demands of my original faith. To confirm this claim, one does not have to seek far; in order to map out a lifetime of challenging spiritual growth, Friends need only to pick up a copy of Faith and Practice from their own yearly meeting, read carefully its counsel on spiritual formation (including its advices and queries), and then open themselves in vulnerability to the searching Light that calls for faithfulness to these many guidelines. This is a task that no one will fully complete.
Without appropriate guidance in such efforts, we may not deepen insight, but our sense of failure. As a boy in a Quaker family, I learned many lessons about what I should and should not do in meeting for worship. These expectations mainly concerned my outward behavior, however—not my inner process. Though sometimes moved by the power and presence of my fellow worshippers, I had no clue as to how to find my own way to such depths. Hunger for spiritual awakening coupled with my inability to find it in meeting for worship ultimately drove me to Zen. There, I found a wealth of direction about the uses of silence. With help from more experienced teachers, I came upon an inward healing path. Because this journey led me not away from myself but more deeply into my own nature, I began to recover childhood visions—hints of wholeness and joy from springs that had seemed dry. I had been viewing Quaker spirituality through a veil accumulated over centuries, an unnoticed conceptual overlay that had distanced me from the living Spirit. Vibrant, unsettling Truth had become prosaic and quaint, leaving me unmoved. I had shrunk from direct experience of Divine power.
A Quaker Spiritual Practice.
In the quest to know God, some yearn for quiet inwardness and repose, others are drawn to ecstatic devotional practices, and yet others find their religious impulses most freely expressed in an active life of engagement, of working in the world. In the white-hot crucible of the early Friends’ movement, these various strands were virtually fused, often in the same person—inner surrender to the Light was expressed in charismatic, bodily outbursts of religious passion and in courageous strength for public witness and activism. This spiritual power arose not from a new set of doctrines and beliefs, but from Friends’ discovery of an experiential path to direct encounter with God. The ministry of George Fox is rife with instruction on this path. Though he repeatedly corrected what he saw as false interpretations of the Christian message, Fox sought above all to direct others to their own inward teacher, the Christ within. No contemporary scholar of early Quakerism has seen this point more clearly than English Friend Rex Ambler.⁹ In a groundbreaking anthology of extracts from the writings of Fox, Truth of the Heart, Ambler writes,
Fox had a distinctive approach of his own, which was not consciously drawing on any of the traditions he inherited. He was not, for example, presenting a teaching that people were expected to believe and follow… . He was telling them rather to do something, because what they needed to make them free and fulfilled as human beings, perfect, was in them, and it was in them already without their having to imbibe it from a church or teaching outside. It was an inner awareness which would enable them initially to see themselves as they were, in reality, beyond the deceptions of the self, but then also to see what they and others could become, and should become… . [I]t in effect challenged everyone to find their own inner truth, and to learn to trust it and live by it… . There was, in fact, for both individual and group, a distinct process to be undergone.¹⁰
Ambler’s assertion that there was… a distinct process to be undergone confirms the judgment of Douglas Gwyn: there was some degree of technique to early Quaker spirituality…, guidance that helped refocus spiritual energies from ego-centered striving to true surrender.¹¹
Gwyn refers to a spiritual technique; Ambler writes of a distinct process to be undergone. What was this technique, this process? What did Fox ask his listeners to do? The most suggestive answers to this question that I have found are in Fox’s writings from the first years of the burgeoning Quaker movement. In restating his spiritual guidance in contemporary language, I find myself returning to familiar terms of Quaker worship, now viewed in a radically revealing light.
Being Still
Stand still in that which is pure, after you see yourselves, and then mercy comes in. After you see your thoughts and the temptations, do not think but submit. Then the Power comes. Stand still in the Light and submit to it, and the other will be hushed and gone. Then contentment comes. When temptations and troubles appear, sink down in that which is pure, and all will be hushed and fly away. Your strength is to stand still.
—George Fox¹²
The practice of waiting upon the Lord in silence is a discipline that halts our nervous compulsions and forces us to stew in our own juices, uncomfortable as that may be. In speaking of the true worship of God, George Fox often quoted God’s gentle rebuke to Peter to stop and listen to Christ. Be still and know that I am God is the way the Psalmist articulated it. (Psalm 46:10)
—Douglas Gwyn¹³
Sitting in deep stillness, opening to the moment, suspending all my efforts to be more than God hath made, I recognize that my many visceral impulses—to shift, fidget, look about, scratch, or make other bodily adjustments—all arise from underlying unease with my condition. Like others, I have cultivated a wide range of largely unconscious strategies for avoiding uncomfortable sensations, thoughts, and feelings, so that I might look elsewhere instead of into myself. The discipline of stillness is painful and humbling but also cleansing, as I open to layers of experience from which I had averted my gaze.
Despite many years of experience in Friends’ meetings for worship, I first practiced such deep stillness in Zen meditation retreats. Only later did I find it affirmed within Quakerism itself. The quotation from Fox above is explicit: Your strength is to stand still. Before meeting houses were constructed to house their gatherings, Friends sometimes quite literally obeyed Fox’s injunction to Stand still in the light. Douglas Gwyn reports that It frightened neighbors to see as many as two or three hundred men, women, and children standing in silence out in a field, in meetings that might go on for hours.¹⁴
In a brief piece from the pages of Friends Journal, contemporary English Friend Caroline Jones emphasizes the importance of physical stillness:
To sink down to the seed we need not only silence, we need also stillness. When we adults fidget in Quaker meeting, we unconsciously reinforce our habitual ways of thinking and being and doing. Fidgeting is a way of avoiding something. When we sit still we come closer to who we are and are more able to observe the shifting sands of the mind that we label I, me, and mine … . Stillness is disturbing. No wonder we fidget and look around and cough; we want to hide from ourselves, from each other, and from God … . Physical stillness is a training ground where we can learn to be less neurotic and more wise. When we practice stillness together in worship, it helps us to become one body, a larger conduit for love and healing.
Physical stillness promotes mental calm. By remaining still and not obeying every impulse to adjust the body, thoughts quiet down and it is easier to discern which ones to act on. By allowing the body to be still, we notice the subtler, more essential movements of life: the breath, the blood, sounds from inside and outside, the movement of air across the skin. When our bodies are relaxed and alert, we see beyond our usual preoccupations and are more available to new insight … . Fidgeting keeps us on the surface; stillness takes us into the depths where we learn to be no more than God hath made.¹⁵
Being Present
Give not way to the lazy, dreaming mind.
—George Fox¹⁶
Even today … few people can sit through an hour of silent Quaker worship without a wandering mind which dodges painfully away from steady reflection. The first efforts at stillness begin to show a person his inadequacy, emptiness of purpose, or well-buried guilt.
—Hugh Barbour¹⁷
Silent Friends’ worship may seem to be a time for uplifting reverie, an opportunity to cultivate inspirational thoughts and pleasantly soothing reflections. Quaker worship then appears under the guise of a subdued escape into an attractive fantasy world. However pleasant (and however widespread) such a use of the silence may be, it is surely not what Fox and other early Quakers intended, not what waiting upon the Lord is about. Their writings emphasize not only physical stillness, but even more, a stillness of thought and will. Isaac Penington’s words provide a brisk clinic for clarity: Give over thine own willing; give over thine own running; give over thine own desiring to know or to be any thing, and sink down to the seed… . I must drop the strivings of my small self if I am to surrender to the presence of Christ within.
Those who have attempted to still their minds for more than a moment will have discovered how difficult it is to do so. Some Asian traditions speak of monkey mind, jumping uncontrollably from here to there to elsewhere without any repose or tranquility. Zen teaching compares an untrained mind to a wild ox that requires many years of taming. Referring to temptations and troubles, George Fox puts his finger upon the two primary sources of this agitation of the mind—desire and fear. Craving this, fleeing that, I lose myself in elaborate mental fantasies. I obsess about the past and future, rehearsing this or that scenario. In contrast, the discipline of stillness requires that I do not think but submit. Eminent Quaker scholar John Punshon writes, The stillness of a Friends’ meeting is a state of great attentiveness, not of abandon.¹⁸ Rather than drifting with the lazy, dreaming mind, committed silent worship calls me back from my fantasies to the immediacy of the present moment, to stand still in the Light and submit to it.
Knowing Myself
The central spiritual insight that inspired 17th-century Quakerism was that Christ has come to teach his people himself,¹⁹ that The God who spoke still speaks.²⁰ And if God is speaking to me, should not I be listening? Many ruefully report that when they listen inwardly, all that they hear is themselves—fantasies and fears, arguments and rehearsals, distractions and preoccupations. Fox saw that such listening is not a failure of worship, however, but a necessary first step in worship itself. In order to hear beneath the chatter of my mind, I must first awaken to the chatter itself. See your thoughts and temptations, says Fox. Expanding upon his advice, the weighty 18th-century Friend Samuel Bownas declared that "It is … highly needful for us to learn to know ourselves, and to keep in it daily, and not to forget and lose the sense of the imperfections and defects in the natural constitution of our own minds."²¹
As my own experience makes all too clear, a true encounter with oneself can be far from comforting. Leading Quaker scholar Hugh Barbour observes of early Friends, The light that ultimately gave joy, peace, and guidance gave at first only terror. ²² Yet to see our thoughts and temptations, to know ourselves, is not to wallow blindly in our
troubles while we await a magical rescue from above. Fox tells us to take heed of being hurried with many thoughts but live in that which goes over them.²³ After I see myself, I should stand still in that which is pure and be stayed in the principle of God. What do these directions mean—and how am I to follow them?
When I struggle with my obsessions, it may seem that I have only two options—to become caught up in my distress, or to push it aside and force my mind to dwell on other things. Fox points to another way, one in which I attend to my inner turmoil without descending into it:
What the light doth make manifest and discover, temptations, confusions, distractions, … do not look at [them] but at the light that … makes them manifest … . For looking down at sin, and corruption, and distraction, you are swallowed up in it; but looking at the light that discovers them, you will see over them. That will give victory; and you will find grace and strength; and there is the first step of peace.²⁴
Seeing my thoughts, cravings, and fears without being drawn into them, I move from self-preoccupation to awareness of a larger reality. This liberating viewpoint is the Light—not a glowing object in my mind’s eye, but rather that which enables me to see my troubles while freeing me from immersion in them. Standing still in the Light, I yield to expansive openness and presence; in the words of Penington and Fox, I find sweet experience and contentment. As early Friend Elizabeth Hendricks writes, I aim to keep close to the Light, and feel the Power of God, and abide in it, and let it be [my] daily care, to remain in the Awe and Fear of God continually… .²⁵ Perhaps no phrase is more characteristic of the ministry of George Fox than his simple words, Live in the Life of God, and feel it.²⁶
The Moment of Truth
Walk in the Truth… stand all naked, bare and uncovered before the Lord.
—George Fox²⁷
Because this process is uncomfortable—I am, after all, experiencing the very parts of myself that I seek to ignore—patience and courage are required. Worship is a form of cleansing, as I lay myself open to God without reservation. John Punshon puts the point uncompromisingly: I must be willing to open my heart completely, give everything I have and hold nothing back in my own secret places. I must, in a word, be willing to be searched myself.²⁸ Margaret Fell counsels fellow Quakers: Now, Friends… let the Eternal Light search you… for this will deal plainly with you, it will rip you up, and lay you open… naked and bare before the Lord God, from whom you cannot hide yourselves.²⁹ As noted by Howard Brinton, Friends’ silent worship has much in common with a spiritual practice made famous by a simple Catholic monk, Brother Lawrence, the practice of the presence of God.³⁰ When I feel that every action I perform, every thought I entertain, is seen through and through by a Divine eye, I have no recourse but to let go and to surrender fully.
Vulnerability to God is also vulnerability to each other. The gathered worship of a true Friends meeting is not merely a cover of silence under which individuals quietly do their own thing; it is a shared endeavor in which many wills simultaneously yield up their separateness so that all may come to know the hidden unity in the Eternal Being.³¹ In such an act of corporate submission, the meeting opens to the power of Truth.
Early Friends’ concept of Truth was thus no mere correspondence of a statement with a state of affairs, nor a bold reporting of the facts, but rather an alignment of the whole being with an electrifying Reality, a riveting, enveloping Presence. Describing George Fox as he rose in meeting to pray, William Penn hints at this power: The most awful, living, reverent frame I ever felt or beheld, I must say, was his in prayer. And truly… he knew and lived nearer to the Lord than other men… .³² Such an alignment may signal itself by dramatic shuddering of the body, or more gently by a wordless sweetness stealing over all who are present, as described by Francis Howgill: "As we waited upon him in pure silence, our minds out of all things, his heavenly presence appeared in our assemblies,
when there was no language, tongue, nor speech from any creature."³³ If we wonder about the rapid growth of Quakerism in 17th-century England, we need look no further than to such infusions of Spirit, when the Power of the Lord is over all.
The moment of Truth is also a moment of conviction: not mere persuasion, but (as in a court of law) being thoroughly seen for who one is. Abandoning private agendas, giving up and yielding, being crucified—humbled and transformed by the Light so that an old self dies and a new one is born—this radical rebirth is as rare as it is precious.
The Challenge of Integrity
All ye that profess, see that you possess, and profess no more than you are.
—George Fox³⁴
For anyone honest and courageous enough to stand still in the Light and allow it to rip you up and lay you open… naked and bare before the Lord God, life can never be the same. Pretense becomes impossible; posturing is a distasteful charade. Surrendering to Truth means that I must live the insight that I have gained. This transformation does not happen overnight; it is the ongoing work of a lifetime. But in the light of Truth, nothing else suffices but to become what I know.
George Fox was thoroughly familiar with those who professed Christian faith and doctrine, but who did not live it from its Source, who had not walked in the light. He called such hypocrites professors (a delicious irony to this emeritus professor), holding them in low esteem. Quakers are not immune from such subtle hypocrisy, to be sure. William Penn cautions his fellow Friends against their own version of spiritual bad faith in meeting for worship:
When you come to your meetings… what do you do? Do you then gather together bodily only, and kindle a fire, compassing yourselves about with the sparks of your own kindling, and so please yourselves, and walk in the "Light of your own fire, and in the sparks which you
have kindled"…? Or rather, do you sit down in True Silence, resting from your own Will and Workings, and waiting upon the Lord, with your minds fixed in that Light wherewith Christ has enlightened you, until the Lord breathes life in you, refresheth you, and prepares you, and your spirits and souls, to make you fit for his service, that you may offer unto him a pure and spiritual sacrifice?³⁵
As Penn’s questions make clear, Quaker integrity goes beyond mere consistency. To live in accord with one’s professed values is to avoid an obvious form of hypocrisy, to be sure; but until one has surrendered oneself to the workings of the Spirit and has become a Child of Light, and hast walked in the light, that consistency is merely formal, lacking the authentic spontaneity of a truly faithful life.
Quaker integrity also implies restraint. Fox observed an absence of self-control in the Ranters, a sometimes Spirit-inspired but often undisciplined religious movement that was contemporaneous with early Quakerism and frequently conflated with it. Fox said of the Ranters that they did not wait upon God… to gather their minds together to feel his presence and power and therein to sit to wait upon him, for they had spoken themselves dry and had spent their portions and not lived in that which they spake.³⁶ Caught up in the enthusiasm of new insight, I may profess more than I possess. To yield to this temptation is to outrun my leading; instead I should stay low, remaining within my portion of the Light, taking care to profess no more than I am.
A God at Hand
Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it? Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it? No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.
—Deuteronomy 30:11-14
When I am no more than God hath made, I open to the truth of my life. No longer straining to be elsewhere, I feel less urgency, more clarity, and comfort. The penumbra of distracting anxiety surrounding my mind, sapping my energy and purpose, is acknowledged and eased by inward opening to the Light.
My experience widens and deepens—and wonder creeps in at the margins. Like a fish that for the first time becomes aware of the ocean in which it swims, I awaken to unbounded intimacy, a benign and encompassing love, a searching light over all, a sense of bathing in and being permeated by blessedness. Momentarily I no longer exist; there is only the experience of being known. Realizing that all is well, I smile. Nothing can eradicate such blessedness. My usual complaints are inconsequential. Generous insights come unbidden. I have no doubt that this aura of beatitude is the love of God, the blessed release, the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding. (Philippians 4:7)
Such moments fade, and I once again shrink into my small self. But my memory lingers, lending conviction to my faith, offering reassurance even in distress. More at ease with my unease, I see over that which would draw me down, and am less captive to its constraints. As I am freed for constructive engagement with the world, I give myself to the work before me.
The treasures that I have found in my Quaker hearth demand earnest polishing and sustained care. I must guard against leaving them once again in the ashes, forgotten. In private moments of the day and in corporate worship with others, turning inward to be still in the Light, I learn, moment by moment, to live in the Life of God, and feel it.
The Journal of George Fox, ed. by John L. Nickalls (London: Religious Society of Friends, 1975), pp. 346-348.
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This observing Self is usually called the Self with a capital S, or the Witness, or pure Presence, or pure Awareness, or Consciousness as such, and this Self as transparent Witness is a direct ray of the living Divine. The ultimate I AM is Christ, is Buddha, is Emptiness itself: such is the startling testimony of the world’s great mystics and sages… Ken Wilbur, A Brief History of Everything, Chap. 12, pp. 197-199. See the following chapter, Pure Passion, for a fuller exploration of this process.
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Some Directions to the Panting Soul, in Works (Glenside, Penn.: Quaker Heritage, 1994), Vol. 2, p. 205.
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The Journal of George Fox, p. 11.
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The Covenant Crucified: Quakers and the Rise of Capitalism (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1995), p. 373.
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ibid.; see esp. pp. 102-106.
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Douglas Gwyn, Seekers Found: Atonement in Early Quaker Experience (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 2000), p. 249.
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The Covenant Crucified, p. 105.
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Rex Ambler, Truth of the Heart: An Anthology of George Fox (London: Quaker Books, 2001). See especially Ambler’s
Preface and the concluding interpretive essay, Making Sense of Fox. I encourage interested readers to familiarize themselves with his work.
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Truth of the Heart, pp. vii-viii.
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Seekers Found, p. 239.
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George Fox, Epistle #10, 1652, in The Power of the Lord Is Over All: The Pastoral Letters of George Fox, Introduced and edited by T. Canby Jones (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1989), p. 7.
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Douglas Gwyn, Unmasking the Idols: A Journey Among Friends (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1989), p. 20.
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The Covenant Crucified, p. 122.
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Caroline Jones, The Value of Stillness, in Friends Journal, April 2001 (Vol. 47, No. 4), p. 5
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George Fox, Epistle XLV from Works (Philadelphia and New York: Gould and Hopper, 1831), p. 56.
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Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 99.
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John Punshon, Encounter With Silence: Reflections from the Quaker Tradition (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1987), p. 8.
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In his writing and preaching, Fox frequently used some version of this phrase. See for example Journal, p. 20.
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Paul Anderson, Is There a Quaker Hermeneutic? in Quaker Religious Thought #97 (Vol. 30, No. 3), p. 6.
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A Description of the Qualifications Necessary to a Gospel Minister (Philadelphia: Pendle Hill Publications and Tract Association of Friends, 1989), p. 83f. Emphasis in original.
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The Quakers in Puritan England, p. 98.
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Epistle #95, 1655, quoted by Howard Brinton, Friends for 300 Years: The history and beliefs of the Society of Friends since George Fox started the Quaker movement (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1952), p. 27.
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Journal, pp. 347f.
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Mary Garman, Judith Applegate, Margaret Benefiel, Dorothy Meredith, eds., Hidden in Plain Sight: Quaker Women’s
Writings 1656–1700 (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1996), p. 471.
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Epistle #95 (1655), excerpted in The Power of the Lord Is Over All: The Pastoral Letters of George Fox, Introduced and edited by T. Canby Jones Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1989), p. 78.
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George Fox, Epistle #11, 1652, in Jones, p. 8.
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Encounter With Silence, p. 11.
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Margaret Fell, Works, pp. 95, 136. Quoted in Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England, p. 98.
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Howard H. Brinton, Friends for 300 Years: The history and beliefs of the Society of Friends since George Fox started the Quaker Movement (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1952, 1965), p. 55. See Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God (Old Tappan, New Jersey: Spire Books, 1958).
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Journal, p. 28.
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William Penn’s Preface to The Journal of George Fox, op. cit., p. xliv.
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Quoted by John Punshon, Encounter With Silence, p. 5.
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To All That Would Know the Way to the Kingdom, in Works, Vol. 4 (New York: AMS Press, 1975), p. 25.
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Quoted in Brinton, Friends for 300 Years, pp. 65-66. I am indebted to Aimee Elsbree for calling my attention to this passage.
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Journal, p. 79.
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